Emerging markets are struggling since last week’s unexpected U.S. presidential election victory by Donald Trump, a man who had campaigned on tearing up trade deals, instituting tariffs, and labeling China a currency manipulator. But the president-elect’s trade rhetoric has less to do with the selloff than you might think, analysts said.

While the prospect of a trade war or heightened geopolitical uncertainty were cited as catalysts for the slump in emerging markets, others said the main issue was investor repositioning in anticipation of Trump’s expected domestic economic policy priorities, particularly a large fiscal stimulus.

“There’s a difference between an emerging market shock that involves actual emerging markets, and one that comes from outside emerging markets,” said Jens Nystedt, head of sovereign research for Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s emerging markets debt team. “We’re more in that latter camp.”

One of the reasons emerging markets had previously risen this year—the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets exchange-traded fund
EEM, -1.28%
remains up 7.8% for 2016 after a drop of 6.6% in November—is that investors had moved into emerging market bonds in an attempt to find income at a time when the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield
TMUBMUSD10Y, +0.67%
was near an all-time low and major markets like Japan or Germany offered negative yields.

The run into emerging market debt lifted the currencies of the countries, which in turn supported their equity markets. Brazil’s Bovespa index
BVSP, -0.90%
for one, remains up nearly 40% thus far this year.

Following Trump’s election victory, there was a huge selloff in U.S. Treasurys, which had the effect of raising U.S. yields to levels not seen in around a year (bond prices and yields move in opposite directions). As a result, investors pulled out of emerging market bonds and moved into U.S.paper.

The iShares J.P. Morgan USD Emerging Markets Bond ETF
EMB, -0.09%
one of the most popular ways to play dollar-denominated emerging market debt, has seen outflows of $528.8 million over the past week, compared with year-to-date inflows of $4.09 billion, according to FactSet data. Between the close of trading on election night and Tuesday’s close, the fund fell 4.3%.

“It was really a repricing in the bond market that led to the selloff in emerging markets. Now that U.S. yields are better, they’ve become far more attractive than EM ones,” said Greg Lesko, managing director at Deltec Asset Management, citing the higher credit ratings of U.S. bonds, which indicate a higher degree of safety.

Lesko singled out Indonesia’s market as one that had been impacted by this shift, noting that the country sold off following the election despite not being a major trading partner with the U.S.

“It has a lot of outstanding debt that a lot of foreigners owned and then sold after the election. The big impact was from the U.S. dollar spiking and U.S. rates rising,” he said, calling the move “a knee-jerk reaction that wasn’t based on specific Trump policies.”

Investors have broadly dumped emerging markets since the election; the broadest iShares MSCI ETF has seen outflows of $2.64 billion over the past week. However, specific regions have seen a wide range of reactions. That divergence is likely tied to judgments about the differing impacts Trump administration polices could have on individual countries. Details on most policy measures remain scarce.

Of the 18 emerging markets tracked by a specific ETF, all but two dropped in price between the election and the close of trading on Tuesday.

Among the gainers was Russia, with the iShares MSCI Russia Capped ETF
ERUS, -0.13%
up 1.8% over the period. (The biggest gainer was Egypt, with the VanEck Vectors Egypt Index ETF
EGPT, -0.34%
up 6.8% over the period, though that move was likely influenced by Egypt’s recent decision to freely float its local currency.)

“There’s a smaller chance of additional economic sanctions against Russia as a result of the election, and as a market participant you can say that it should benefit from this apparent political narrowing between the U.S. and Russia,” Nystedt, said, though he expects the bigger factor for Russia to be commodity prices than political issues.

The iShares MSCI Mexico Capped ETF
EWW, -1.56%has been the hardest hit among emerging markets, down more than 15%. Trump has proposed a number of policies that are seen as extremely detrimental to the country, including tariffs and building a wall between the U.S.-Mexico border.

“As a percentage of GDP, Mexico’s exports to the U.S. are more than double what the U.K. exports to the European Union, so if you raise tariffs by 35% on those goods, well, we know what the impact would be,” said Audrey Kaplan, co-head of the international equity team at Federated Investors. “We’re still learning all the details [of the policies], but given what happened after Brexit, there are concerns. We are concerned.”

Kaplan was referring to Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the European Union earlier this year. While the full economic fallout from that event remains unclear, it has taken the pound
GBPUSD, +0.1477%
to multidecade lows.

Several investors have said that the decline in emerging markets has been overdone, noting that the shift from one region’s bonds to another doesn’t change economic fundamentals. There are even signs that some regions are now viewed as bargains; the Mexico ETF has seen inflows of about $635 million since the election, suggesting investors are taking advantage of the drop in prices.

“This is the conundrum right now: how vulnerable are emerging markets?” Kaplan asked. “We got to keep looking at the data and the exchange rates, and to consider geopolitical risk and reward, but I think that for a long-term investor, this could prove to be an attractive opportunity.”

The table below shows how different single-country ETFs have performed since the U.S. election; the price data comes from FactSet while the flow data was taken from ETF.com. In both cases, the data covers the period between the close of trading on election day and yesterday’s close.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use.
Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information.
All quotes are in local exchange time. Real-time last sale data for U.S. stock quotes reflect trades reported through Nasdaq only.
Intraday data delayed at least 15 minutes or per exchange requirements.